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Thursday, July 8, 2010

Thursday, July 8, 2010

"Settle down, class; it's time to begin. I would welcome you to your second day of Frosting 101, but frankly after this many years of teaching I find your eager little faces to be an inexorable scourge, dragging me down each day to fresh depths of hellish ineptitude.

[brightly] "So let's just get started, shall we?

"First of all, you should note that I often use the words 'ice' and 'frost' interchangeably. So you brown-nosing idiots with the bags of ice can just go dump those in the sink. Yes, now. Thank you.

"Okey dokey, I will now hold up the results of yesterday's pop quiz and mock you each accordingly. And since I can't be bothered to remember your names, I've assigned you each a nickname based on the individual horrors of what I will laughingly call your 'cakes.'

"Let's start with you, Mr. Gap-Cracky."

"Yes, you. Your name is now 'Mr. Gap-Cracky' because I've seen less gaping holes in some of your hipster friends' jeans. Ever heard of a spatula? Or do you coil all your icing at home?

"Oh, be quiet; that was rhetorical.

"Next up is Ruffles."

"My dear, how is it that you managed to change the colors of your icing, but not the tip on your pastry bag? Is that leaf tip glued in place? Or are you just sentimentally attached to making really, really ugly things?

"Oh, you think that's funny, Stegosaurus? How about we look at *your* cake?

"Do you know why your nickname is 'Stegosaurus,' son? No? It's because the Stegosaurus has a brain the size of a walnut. What'd you, spread this with your feet?

[rubbing temples] "And next we have Sprinkles."

[sighing] "I would lambaste you with a withering criticism, Sprinkles, but I can see from your vacant expression that intelligent thought is lost on you. So just give me your sprinkles jar and go sit in the back. Go on. There's a good boy.

"I have to hand it to you, Ms. Puff n' Stuff; if I hadn't cut into your cake I might not have discovered your deception:

"Gopher guts, girl, I've seen meringue pies with less filling! What are you, some kind of plant sent by an insulin manufacturer? Are you trying to kill us all?

"What's that? You like icing? Well, Duncan Hines, girl, *I* like my pancreas. You think we can reach some kind of compromise that doesn't include me in diabetic shock? Hm?

"And finally, for your final classmate, I'm afraid I ran out of clever nicknames.

"So I'm just going to call you Crap Pile, son. Judging by this cake, I'm sure you're accustomed to answering to much worse.

[bell rings]

"Ok, class, time for you to get back to your bakeries and ruining the happy occasions of cake lovers everywhere. Have fun. I'll just be here, weeping for your clients."

Is Crap Pile's cake supposed to be a basket weave? I can see right now I need to be showing my almost 5 year old *these* pictures and not the ones off the Wilton website so she's not disappointed in her giraffe birthday cake. Of course, no one is paying me for the cake. (I'll be paying therapists because of it...)

My 2.5 year old daughter sits on my lap while I read CW every morning and says for every cake, "I want that for my birthday party! I want that for my birthday party!" for every single one. Yet even my 2.5 year old cake-obsessed (well, birthday obsessed) toddler said, "What the heck?" (with the cutest inflection ever) to the "frosting with cake under it"

Ok, they were bad but I came to a halt when I saw ms puff n stuff. OMG. That was not a sunken cake, it was an entire layer that was missing. Did that person forget to bake/thaw the second layer and think the recipient was NOT going to notice that the height was due to the ton of icing?

And I thought the ruffle one was bad enough (probably trying to match the food network cake challenge of decorating a cake with a single tip), but the last one really one out. What in the world was that supposed to be? Someone's interpretation of basket weave? Picasso's work is easier to understand than that.

Re: Puff 'n Stuff; did they run out of sheet cakes that day? Or was the birthday boy/girl a known frosting fiend? Because I have to tell you, I do know a few folks who eat frosting straight out of the jar and would be all over that "cake."

The last one proves that you CAN frost a cake with the big old icing tip and not smooth it out with a spatula. But just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD. They must have been really, really short on time.

Hi-freakin-larious!!! I was laughing so hard at my desk! What the heck are some of those things? Was there a national "Throw some crappy icing on top of a cake making no particular resemblance to anything" Day that I didn't know about?! Ah!

I'm surprised no one's commented on "Stegosaurus" yet. The more-icing-then-cake was funny and terrible, but at least they did a fairly good job of it.... but come on! Stegosaurus's cake was absolutely terrible! The cake itself looked great, but whyyyy would you put out a cake after just dumping the icing on it? Without using anything to spread it over the cake or anything??? Honestly, when I first looked at that cake I thought it was covered in snot.... just terrible.

What makes Puff 'N' Stuff worse is if you look really closely it looks like Half of the cake is normal. Either half of the cake fell and they didn't want top bother rebaking it or they didn't want to bother stacking on the other half of the layer. There is no excuse for that abomination! If the cake did fall.....that means that the part covered with frosting probably tastes nasty!

My daughter, now 4, has been decorating cakes for two years. Her first cake ever had a better icing job. Oh sure, it was still a mess, but she was 2 so it was frickin' adorable and understandable, and just for Daddy's birthday.

How these people continue to get *paid* is beyond me.

I really, really, really want you to start teaching classes in precisely this style. Just think, you could surpass Kerry Vincent in number of decorators who fear your withering stare.

Maybe you should come do a talk/class at the 2011 Austin show...hrm...*thoughtspercolatingwildlymuahahahaha*...

WV: ooleet, as in, oo, I never thought leet speakers could spell better than some cake decorators.

I don't comment often, but I must say that today's post is especially funny! And 'crap pile' was classic. I may start using it around the house, but then I get those intrusive questions from my children...

These truly hit an all time low, and even Simon what's-his-face couldn't have put them down better. My daughter at 10 years old did much better than this. She took at Wilton class at Penney's by herself. Ah, Jen, could you check out the difference between "less" and "fewer" - one of my pet peeves. Fewer modifies individual numbers (cracks) and Less modifies total quantity or amount.Norine

I'm with Lady J. Why so little attention to Stegosaurus. It takes real chutzpah to display a cake into which you've put such an obvious lack of effort. At least puff-n-stuff TRIED! Most of your wrecks are like that... sad, but at least reflecting effort and worthy of a giggle, snarf, laugh, guffaw, etc. But Stegosaurus just made me mad. Am I rambling? Cause it feels like I'm rambling. That's what happens to me when people totally phone it in.

Even if these wreckerators are incompetent, lazy, and completely lacking any hint of taste, where are the bakery and/or store managers to prevent these embarrassments from going on display? These are so bad, they are thoroughly unappetizing... and presumably unsaleable.

These are so bad, that your witty remarks still couldn't elicit anything beyond a shudder and wince!!

And as for PuffnStuff-- I don't like most icings. So maybe I'm just nauseated because of that?

OMG...the Puff N Stuff cake is amazing! Did they really think no one would notice? Or is it like the drive-thru? They figure by the time you notice what they've done you'll be too far away to do anything. Except in this case you put it on the internet for everyone to laugh at and mock. Awesome! :)

That "stegosaurus" cake seriously looks like it's been topped with that foamy barf that my bulldog likes to launch all over the carpet after gulping down too much water! My gag reflex was totally activated just by looking at that cake!

Hey! I'm a total cakewrecks fan, but I didn't find the diabetes jokes funny....becoming diabetic has nothing to do with eating too much sugar at one time. Type 1 diabetes is caused from your pancreas shutting down. However, 95% of diabetics are type 2, so I'm going to assume that you are referring to that. Of course, eating that cake everyday and subsequently becoming overweight WILL cause diabetes. but just one slice will not. All in all, try not to make diabetes joke, because it just spreads the ignorance.

Is the ms Puf-n-stuf cake an Ice-cream cake? I thought they were usual in America...if not ice-cream, that is what we in England call hideously grotesque or just plain blech! x x x love the site btw...my 8yr oldloves to have a sneaky peek....

The stegosaurus cake makes me think that perhaps the baker was out sick suddenly, but there were no decorated cakes out, so the manager grabbed the janitor and said, can you slap some icing on these quick and put them out? Thanks man!

It looks to me like Puff-n-Stuff is almost certainly NOT an ice cream cake. Simply because, you can see in the the piece behind (uppermost part of the image, slightly left of center) that the cake layer there DOES reach up nearly to the top, and is covered by a more-sane layer of icing.

(Which makes the crazily-concave shape of the entire cake all the more gross.)

As a Cake Decorating Instructor.....I'm laughing to the point of needing an oxygen tank to help me catch my breath. This is hysterical. This makes my day. Thank you for what you do. Here's hoping you & I never go out of business. I'm pretty sure we've both got job security forever!

Actually crippled with giggles, Jen you know just how to strike the right tone for every post, but this was something above and beyond. "Just going to call you Crap Pile" :')

As for the actual cakes, well the Ms. Puff n' Stuff has to be the most heinous simply because of the genuine danger to the consumer's wellbeing. Though the one by ruffles amused me most for the sheer strangeness of ruining what might have been an actually passable cake by using a leaf tip for the whole thing [thinking about it Ruffles might have just lost all the other tips].

Seriously, what happens to cakes that no-one will ever buy? Homeless shelters? Delivered to local schools and cut up to hide the shame? Inquiring raccoons want to know, because we're not finding enough cake in your trash.

It's true that eating a lot of sugar (by itself) doesn't cause diabetes. But eating a lot of sugar will kill you if you HAVE diabetes. That's what I took to be the assumption behind the "diabetes" jokes.

I am speechless.. almost. These are hilarious. I would have loved to be the idiot in the back of that classroom laughing my head off lol. I would of course be sent to the principle but I would be happy. Ugh what on earth do these people take every morning to produce these horrid things??

Those were some amazingly badly frosted cakes. The last one looks to me like it was made using the leftover icing from several other cakes just sort of haphazardly applied in a mediocre attempt at an artistic design.

When, after Sprinkles, you said "I can see from your vacant expression," my brain immediately went on to "the lights are not all on upstairs, but we're talking kings and succession. Even YOU can't get caught unawares!"

And BTW my fellow Grammar Snobs: if the "less" you refer to were modifying "gaps" you would be correct in your nit-pickyness. If, as I believe, Jen was using it to modify "gaping", she was 100% correct. My 2 cents...

I guess I'm the only one who looked at Puff n' Stuff's cake and went yum! That's like my perfect ratio XD I'm well known for liking the frosting more than the cake :) If I had to choose between the two, it'd be frosting every time ^^

I laughed so hard at the name, "Mr Gap Cracky" that it was difficult to continue. I was giggling uncontrollably and it actually scared me....like, what if I couldn't stop to catch a breath? I was clutching my chest, sure that I was having a laugh induced heart attack.

Luckily, it wasn't a heart attack. I'm ok. My insides still feel a little shaky but I'm not hurt.

I love your blog here. I found it yesterday (at work), and was laughing so hard at some of the wedding cakes that I couldn't stop crying. Hard to believe there are so many bad cakes and bakers out there... Keep them coming!

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